Section 99: A Good Man - The First Part of the Second Draft!

Damn, what a title.

Hey hi, I've been meaning to do this for a while! Here's the second draft of A Good Man, revised down to the first break. Big things you'll probably notice: an overall lesser aggro dickishness to Van, now that we know a fair bit about why he is the way he is, and also, an overall feeling of control to him, he's not much of an exposed nerve at first. Further- better characterization of what it is Van's doing and how he intends to do it, as rather than some berserk bounty hunter, the man's a recognized and respected security figure now. Compare for yourself! The 2nd Draft is on top, while the old version is right beneath. Enjoy! 

---

Van Parker was having an awful day, all things considered. His last joint was 12 hours into the past, he'd been sat pretending to read his tablet at the table of a donair place whose lunch offering was both disappointing and insubstantial, and the gun he was wearing didn't fit the shoulder holster he'd printed for it, and it was beginning to dig into his ribs.

It got worse when he caught sight of the guy he was out for, as the scumbag checked his messages at a local backroom FTL comms operator. He couldn't just have been the easy mark he looked like, some dipshit dandyism aspirant whose hat didn't era match his suit jacket, which didn't colour match his shoes. No, it was the fact that a man so self-evidently mediocre had, somehow, developed the sort of tail-sense you normally only find in small woodland creatures, and proceeded to run like one after the second corner taken.

A small woodland creature, with a machine pistol beneath his faux-pas jacket.

Chasing people didn’t bother Van, because running couldn’t tire him any more, he was too much machine, too bionic to be limited by exertion. The part that bothered him was being led down a killzone alley by weedy little man with a weapon, who couldn’t not let out a little shriek before he cut loose with a burst when he rounded the corner into his sights Van sucked in air and put his all into a single hard thrust of movement, sending him cannonballing into the side of an aircon unit. Full auto fire raked down the alley, kicking up a haze of asteroid dust and shards of dead beer bottles. Van's still-biological kidneys hated him from the impact, even shielded with subdermal armour as they were; his cover held though. So he wormed himself into a prone and found his weapon, peeking out an angle on the halfway-dandy. Dickhead fired again, and it was clear now he was panic shooting, maybe as scared to hit someone as he was to be chased. So Van put slugs from his automag down the alley, blowing loose pipes and wires from the surrounding habs. Dickhead yelped, squeezed the rest of his mag into a dustpile and peeled off around the corner at the alley’s t-junction.

Inwardly, Van reconsidered his life choices. Outwardly, pressed up and ran after, chasing panicked footprints in the dust of the maze-like back access alley. There was a shout of “oh, you fucking assholes!” from the upper window of a nearby hab. Van shouted back “I am so, so sorry, just get in your bathtub for a sec!”

He really was sorry, for what it was worth.

The hab alley opened up into an overlook above a street on a lower stratum of the hollowed-out rock the settlement was built in, with a skywalk across to the neighborhood dive, a construct of big windows, neon and a single hololithic sign that read ICEHAUS, the sort of place that never closed, because neither did the Port of St. Joseph. Dickhead sprinted across the skywalk, and stumbled on his fashion choices- faux-vintage spats weren’t well geared for finding traction on metal grating. When he caught sight of Van, he spun, raised up his machine pistol again and pulled a dead trigger. He pulled it again, and his panic reached a head with an audible shriek. Especially when Van raised up on him.

"Oh come on man, please!" Van knew instantly how much he hated this man. He shaped that hatred into a little green crosshair over his groin, projected onto the inside of his eyes by his bionics.

The 11 millimeter slug Van's magnum roared loose creased out the inside of Dickhead's thigh, tore a literal strip out of him. He straightened, eyes wide, mouth a suckhole, and then he stumbled down to a knee. He screamed. Van approached.

"You fucking asshole, you nearly shot my balls off," he shrieked, trying to get hold of the railing of the skywalk with one hand, and hold his opened leg shut with his other.

"I know," Van said, holstering his weapon, his voice a growl. “You must have flinched.” He hooked the dickhead under the arm and hefted him up into a limp, dragging him bleeding across the grating toward the dive.

"Kurt Weller, yeah?" asked Van, ratcheting his arm.

"Maybe, maybe not," said Weller, further confirming to Van his character: pull a gun on a man, run out of ammo, plead for mercy, then give sass? This was a man looking to win a stupid prize, in his book.

The kneelift Van planted to his face turned his nose into a faucet. Weller pitched forward and grabbed at his face, so Van released his hold and drove his heel into his ass. The Dickhead hit the glass door of the ICEHAUS’ upper balcony, flopped against it, streaking red through the film of powder-fine asteroid dust it was collecting. Van slapped off his hat and grabbed a fistfull of his hair.

“Unless there’s another narrow-assed speakeasy poseur on this rock, who just happens to have that same knife scar on your cheek, you are Weller, and you just got done selling a young friend of mine as illicit labor.”

“And you think I’m some sorta snitch too?”

“No, I think talking to you like an adult is the most degrading thing I’ve done today.”

Van peeled him off the glass, sank fingers into his collarbone, pulled him to face, then plowed his right through his nose, into his sinuses. His wreckage, his body little more than three limp bags of wet concrete, Weller flew backwards through the already damaged glass door.

“You people keep it outdoors,” came a shout from downstairs, the voice of bartender used to enforcing control, “Nobody in here needs that kind of shit.”

“My name is Van Parker, I’m an agent of the Sendra Clan Office operating out of the Southland Point neighborhood, where I am a registered Community Enforcement Trustee,” Van began, his voice a push-pull between his want to crush the living shitheap he had in is grasp, and his need to deescalate a situation facing the public. “Anyone who wants to confirm, call Public Central Bureaucracy, my credentials a 30 second check away.”

“Please help me, this man is a murderer wanted out of Dos Santos, he’s been after myself and my family for the past three months,” said the Dickhead, trying to drag himself on the railing overlooking the lower level of the bar, drag himself out of this situation by extension. The glass he’d gone through was safety grade, but the powder it was breaking down to was starting to mix with his blood and seep into his wounds, not a pleasant feeling.

“This man is Kurt Weller, he’s the middleman for the kidnap crew that took Taino Sendra, grandson of Clan Matriarch Janila Sendra, and I’m serving an internal matter, we’ll be out of your hair in just a few moments,” Van said, feeling the weight of his Clanwrit ID in his jacket’s interior pocket.

“He said he was going to use my daughter as target practice once he got done with me,” Weller said, finding as much of an upright base as he could manage against the glass railing of the upper floor overlook.

This was enough for Van. The flat of his foot landed flush with the Dickhead’s face, heel to chin, toes to hairline. The safety glass railing bent, then busted apart with a single loud crack, sending the two tipping over the ledge. Weller hit the floor the hard way, through an uncleared bar table, and Van came down on top of him. He wanted to give him the full weight, but 260-worth of meat, bone and bionics would have flatlined the Dickhead from that height, crushed his chestcase like a pea pod. Instead he pulled up into a lovetap’s worth of a kneedrop across Weller’s lungs, just so Dickhead could know what losing at pro wrestling felt like.

The din of the fall died, and someone shouted “Jesus Christ” from a back booth.

“Oh yeah, you go to church,” Van said, mostly to himself.

He took a look around, and the fire in him lost a bit of its rage. Nobody was on the top floor of the bar, but there was more than few on the first floor, hardy dock-working folk with thick arms and hard hands. There were no screams, no panic towards the nearest exits, just angry murmurs and cracking knuckles. From his end, he’d been involved a minor running gunfight with a sapient trafficker, shot him, thrown him through plate glass and then kicked him off a bar balcony- this was not the behavior of a welcomed individual. Especially among Terran longshorers built like highway dividers downing strong lager like lemonade, heavy-framed Cogitoi with bare-metal lifter arms and mason jars of apple-mash shine, and wiry, sharp-eyed Rhidling can-pusher pilots lighting their spiced kelladi on fire before shooting it. He could feel the heat of the room roiling off of everyone looking in his direction.

“Like I said,” he took the edge out of his voice. “This is an internal matter to the Sendra Clan, I’m dealing with a sapient trafficker here, you can call my ID to Public Central, I’m Parker, callsign CANINE-6, I’m a CET operating out of SoPo. I’ll be out of your hair in a minute.” Van glanced at the bartender and cringed- the man was a polished cubeball.

“This isn’t a bounty hall, get the fuck out,” the bartender said, arms like saplings wrapped in a hack tattoo artist’s sample sheets, head like a calloused knuckle.

“Call me a lift and I’ll cart him out,” said Van. He rolled Weller onto his belly, locked his arms behind his back and pinned his thumbs together in a single fist. “Man has information to the whereabouts

“Get the fuck out!” the bartender shouted, hands sinking beneath the bartop for something Van couldn’t see. He pinged his sensors- a flaregun? This motherfucker was going for a flaregun on him? St. Joes’ was a weapons-restricted colony by virtue of being surrounded by vacuum, so most folks couldn’t lay hands on regular guns inside of city limits. Even still, Van couldn’t help but feel a baseball bat would be more dignified.

“This man is facilitated the monetary trade of a Rhidling teenager, 16 years old, the only blood heir of the Sendra Clan right now, and I am as of this moment I am issuing Assistance Bounties to anyone who aids this agent in the apprehension of a dangerous individual,” Van’s voice rose again, not a shout, a loud declaration that rose out of his gut and hit his own ears like a gunshot. “Anyone want to be useful and help put away a bad guy, or does he gotta look like an empty glass for any of you folks to do something about him?”

All around him was tension, the pressure of a room that wasn’t sure if it wanted to fall in on him, believing the Dickhead’s story. It made Van go just the slightest bit cold, the slightest bit numb, made the world just the slightest bit quieter. In the back of his head, but also all around him, he both felt and heard the distant click of dog nails, clicking on a hard floor, circling him.

Then he heard the voice:

Someone makes a mean move, you sic ’em, boy, it said. Low. Growling. Coldly Logical. Canid.

Van hated that voice in his head. He hated that phrase. He hated what repeating it to himself, in that esoteric little way inside his own head, did to both him and everything around him.

Even so, he resolved that if anyone moved to help the Dickhead, he’d make an example of them right there, right then. The room was the right sort of quiet for someone to try, quiet enough that Weller trying to remember how to breathe was loud.

The Voice in his head took notice of the choking wheeze. Even as it intently perused the pinging scans of his surround sensors, looking for anything that might suggest imminent attack, it made a sound halfway between a growl and a satisfied chuckle at his pain.

Movement, direct behind, from the Rhidling container pilots. “If this man is who you say he is,” one of them said, and Van locked to the vector of the voice. Confident, unshaken, unshy- that’s a threat. The weapon in his holster got just a titch heavier.

He turned, keeping his movement smooth, deliberate. He found a Rhidling woman pushing through the surrounding crowd, head and shoulders shorter than the mostly Terrans that ringed him, steady and hard looking. Van took the bionics off and let his eyes do the appraisal; nose-broke, but healed well; left ear marred, big chunk missing; brawler’s chin, a scar like a knife-nick she rolled with. About 30, hard knuckled, sharp clawed and fit- if her swagger was fake, she was a hell of an actor, because most couldn’t get across it at quite the low key level she was managing it. The way she kept her tail coiled close to her leg he did know how to read- he had experience with that being either curiosity posture, or someone with a razorblade hidden in their pseudohand gearing up to take a swipe at his eyes. Either way, Van didn’t let his guard down.

“Then that would explain why I saw this guy getting out of a hack with a kid that looked like he was stoned out of his mind late yesterday,” she continued.

Van unclenched by about half, and the weapon stopped hanging so heavy under his arm. “That a fact?” he said to her, maintaining his thumbcuff hold on Weller.

“Fact it is. Myself,” she said putting a thumb to her chest. “Yijay and Seyka all saw it. Terran with the weird suit, and a kid who looked a little beat up, and a lot bit out of it.” Van saw she had a tag on her flight jacket, but he couldn’t make out her name script from where she was standing. He did make the two big important details that told him to stand down, though. The first was the Star Knot on her jacket collar, the little silver pin that identified her as a graduated captain of one of the 8 accredited rhidling starflight schools- those don’t get given to hacks and amateurs. The second was her clanrune, patched onto her jacket’s shoulder: Maniro. He hadn’t been keeping up with clan politics as of late, but unless a bomb went off and he hadn’t heard about it, he knew the Maniro and the Sendra were on terms like kin to each other.

“And you’re sure that’s him?” he asked her

“Never seen another terran dressed like him, he weird or something?” She beckoned at Weller’s, everything.

“Nah. Just a Dickhead chasing a style.”

The appearance of a full blown boat captain taking the side of the violent interloper turned the mood of the room, established a pecking order between the burly stevedores and wiry can-fliers- oh shit, the Dominant Female just spoke up. Suddenly, this wasn’t a spilled-in street fight that was bothering honest folk just looking for an off work drink; suddenly, this was just as much of a problem as the big guy using the jiu jitsu grip on the smaller guy had made it seem.

It helped that the cap’s contemporaries ringed in around her, a wall of pocket-sized muscle. Rhidlings rarely stood taller than 5’2, but even still, most folks would back off from a stand-up brawl with one. Folks with claws have a habit of climbing taller opponents, after all.

Van pulled his phone, searched for a picture of Taino. He skipped past the ones of him out with the kid, being his Sibling from Another Species- bodyguard was one of the hats Van had worn in his life, and it fit nicely beneath the big brother hat he wore with it at the same time. Instead he found Taino’s Interstellar Travel ID photo, and flashed it to the cap.

“This who you saw with him?”

The cap looked the kid over. In her head, she ticked the boxes- about 15 or 16, tick. Hide colour a mid tan, a northerner’s skintone- tick. His coat vestiges and hair were right- red mini-leopard rosettes against dark blonde fur on his cheeks and forehead, where it thickened into his hairline, and white eartufts. Same tousled, shit-disturber haircut. Blue eyes.

“Oh yeah, that’s him. Handsome kid.” She said.

“And you’re willing to help out with this matter?” Van asked, reaching

“I owe a more than a few Sendra out there, I’d ride to war with those folks.” She beckoned to the cutter pilots, who were turning the mood of the crowd. “Same as, with them.”

He nodded “I know the feeling,” Van said as he pulled the Sendra Clanwrit and his Trustee ID from his wallet. When he handed it to the cap, she glanced at the 5-star rating on his TID and raised an eyebrow, but when she made the authenticity of the Clanwrit- real ink, written in a calligrapher’s hand, embossed with the Chief’s punch, his image blackpoint-printed onto traditional zali pulp paper -she started smirking.

“I’ve heard about you…” she started, and Van’s stomach sank.

“Are you people leaving my establishment, or am I calling Civil Security?” the bartender piped up, finding his voice among the murmurs in the gathering cloud.

“Yeah, actually, do that, bout time you did something useful,” Van snapped at him. An echo of sic ‘em boy echoed in his mind as he stared at the near literal knucklehead who was willing to keep his arms folded over a sapient trafficker.

The bartender in turn, caught a glint of something in his eyes. A green flash, like seething lightning, there and gone in a blink; something subtle and something evil. He understood now that calling CivSec actually was the correct choice in his situation.

---

Van Parker was having an awful day, all things considered. His last joint was 12 hours into the past, he'd been sat pretending to read his tablet at the table of a donair place whose lunch offering was both disappointing and insubstantial, and the gun he was wearing didn't fit the shoulder holster he'd printed for it, and it was beginning to dig into his ribs.

It got worse when he caught sight of the guy he was out for, as he checked his messages at a local backroom FTL comms operator. He couldn't just have been the easy mark he looked like, some dipshit dandyism aspirant whose hat didn't era match his suit jacket, which didn't colour match his shoes. No, it was the fact that a man so self-evidently mediocre had nevertheless developed the sort of tail-sense you normally only find in small woodland creatures, and proceeded to run like one after the second corner taken.

A small woodland creature, with a machine pistol beneath his faux-pas jacket.

Red-faced and swearing as much as he was marathon-breathing, Van rounded a narrow alley in a tight pack of prefab habs, only to find a raised muzzle pointed at him, with a dickhead behind it. Van sucked in air and put his all into a single hard thrust of movement, sending him cannonballing into the side of an aircon unit. Full auto fire raked down the alley, kicking up a haze of asteroid dust and shards of dead beer bottles. Van's kidneys hated him from the impact; his cover held. So he wormed himself into a prone and found his weapon, peeking out an angle on the halfway-dandy. Dickhead fired again, and it was clear now he was panic shooting, maybe as scared to hit someone as he was to be chased. So Van put slugs from his automag down the alley, blowing loose pipes and wires from the surrounding habs. Dickhead yelped, squeezed the rest of his mag into a dustpile and peeled off around the corner at the alley’s t-junction.

Inwardly, Van reconsidered his life choices. Outwardly, he pressed up and ran after. A shout from the habs of "Oh you fucking assholes!" he met meekly with "I am so fucking sorry, please, get in your bathtub."

The hab alley opened up into an overlook above a street on a lower stratum of the hollowed-out rock the settlement was built in, with a skywalk across to the neighborhood dive, a construct of big windows, neon and a single holograph sign that read ICEHAUS, the sort of place that never closed, because the Port of St. Joseph never actually stopped or even slowed down. Dickhead was stumbling across the skywalk, trying to find his feet on the grip grating, his clashing shoes obviously not made for running. When he caught sight of Van, he raised up his machine pistol again and pulled a dead trigger. He pulled it again, and his panic reached a head. Especially when Van raised up on him.

"Oh come on man, please!" Van knew instantly how much he hated this man.

The 11 millimeter slug Van's magnum roared loose creased out the inside of Dickhead's thigh, tore a literal strip out of him. He straightened, eyes wide, mouth a suckhole, and then he stumbled down to a knee. He screamed. Van approached.

"You fucking asshole, you nearly shot my balls off," he shrieked, trying to get hold of the railing of the skywalk with one hand, and hold his opened leg shut with his other.

"I know, I missed," Van said, his voice a growl. He hooked the dickhead under the arm and hefted him up into a limp, dragging him bleeding across the grating toward the dive.

"Kurt Weller, yeah?" asked Van, ratcheting his arm.

"Maybe, maybe not," said Weller, further confirming to Van how much he hated this little man, who plead for mercy only after running out of ammo, then turned around and gave him sass afterward.

The kneelift Van planted to his face turned his nose into a faucet. Weller pitched forward and grabbed at his face, so Van released his hold and drove his heel into his ass. The Dickhead hit the glass door of the ICEHAUS’ upper balcony, flopped against it, streaking red through the film of powder-fine asteroid dust it was collecting. Van slapped off his hat and grabbed a fistful of his hair.

“Unless there’s another narrow-assed speakeasy poseur on this rock, who just happens to have that same knife scar on your cheek, you are Weller, and you just got done selling a young friend of mine as illicit labor.”

“And you think I’m some sorta snitch too?”

“No, I think talking to you like an adult is the most degrading thing I’ve done today.”

Van peeled him off the glass, craned his neck back, and drove the barrel of his gun into the back of his head, at lovetap strength. He ragdolled, and the punch sent him through the glass in a heap.

“You people keep it outdoors,” came a shout from downstairs, the voice of bartender used to enforcing control, “Nobody in here needs that kind of shit.”

“This is an open armament settlement,” Van yelled back, “And he drew down and shot at me first, on account of I was coming to put his people-trafficking op out of work. Don’t suppose this is the kind of person you folks want in your community?”

“Please help me, this man is a murderer wanted out of Dos Santos, he’s been after myself and my family for the past three months,” said the Dickhead, trying to drag himself on the railing overlooking the lower level of the bar, trying to drag himself out of this situation. The glass he’d gone through was safety grade, but the powder it was breaking down to was starting to mix with his blood and seep into his wounds, not a pleasant feeling.

“This man is Kurt Weller, he’s the middleman for the kidnap crew that took Taino Sendra. He’s got a bounty on his head from Janila Sendra and the Sendra Clan for his live capture and delivery to Alemeka Grove, on Samoud,” Van said, feeling the Clanwrit in his jacket’s interior pocket.

“He said he was going to use my daughter as target practice once he got done with me,” Weller said, finding as much of an upright base as he could manage.

This was enough for Van. The flat of his foot landed flush with the Dickhead’s face, heel to chin, toes to hairline. He pitched over the rail, tumbled a full back somersault, and landed shoulders down across a stand-up table, killing a few highballs and bottles, sending patrons scattering. Van followed after, the mini-EVArig he was wearing braking his fall against the settlement’s artificial gravity to a minor thud. A minor thud he planted in Weller’s chest with his knee.

“Jesus Christ,” someone exclaimed from a booth.

“Oh yeah, you go to church,” Van said, mostly to himself.

He took a look around, and went cold. Nobody was on the top floor of the bar, but there was more than few on the first floor, hardy dock-working folk with thick arms and hard hands. More to the point, he just realized he’d survived a minor running gunfight with a person trafficker, shot him, thrown him through plate glass and then kicked him off a bar balcony. This was not the behavior of a welcomed individual, especially among Terran longshorers built like highway dividers downing strong lager like lemonade, heavy-framed Cogitoi with bare-metal lifter arms and mason jars of apple-mash shine, and wiry, sharp-eyed Rhidling can-pusher pilots lighting their spiced kelladi on fire before shooting it. He could feel the heat of the room roiling off of everyone looking in his direction.

“He shot first,” he said, the force ebbing from his voice. “Go up to the catwalk, his piece is still smoking on it.”

“This isn’t a fucking bounty hall, get the fuck out,” the bartender said, a man whose arms looked like they were rolled up tattoo samplers, with a head like a calloused knuckle.

“Nah, seriously, go up there, grab a friend for your bar shotgun.”

“Get the fuck out!” the bartender shouted, hands sinking beneath the bartop.

“This man is facilitated the monetary trade of a Rhidling teenager, 14 years old, the only blood heir of the Sendra Clan right now, and I am as of this moment the issuing agent for the reward on his head,” Van’s voice rose again, not a shout, a loud declaration that rose out of his gut and hit his own ears like a gunshot. “Anyone want to be useful and help put away a bad guy, or does he gotta look like an empty glass for any of you folks to do something about him?”

Someone makes a mean move, you sic ’em, boy.

Van hated that voice in his head. He hated that phrase.

Sic ’em, boy.

He resolved that if anyone moved to help the Dickhead, he’d make an example of them right there, right then. It was the right sort of quiet for someone to try, quiet enough that Weller trying to remember how to breathe was loud.

Then, instead, someone said from behind him “If this man is who you say he is,” and Van held his fight instinct at the vector it was pointing him. For a second, his gun felt infinitely heavy in his hand.

Instead he turned, keeping his movement smooth, deliberate. He found a Rhidling woman pushing through the surrounding crowd, head and shoulders shorter than the mostly Terrans that ringed him, steady and hard looking. Van gave her a scanning glance; nose broke, healed well, left ear marred, big chunk missing, brawler’s chin, about 30- she’s either a threat or she thinks she’s a threat. His finger tightened on the trigger just slightly, but he held his weapon down at his side, still.

“Then that would explain why I saw this guy getting out of a hack with a kid that looked like he was stoned out of his mind yesterday,” she continued.

Van’s trigger finger loosened. “That a fact?” he said.

“Yeah, talking with the clan about rounding him up and having a close talk with him just now. Nice coincidence, yeah?” she said. Van saw she had a tag on her flight jacket, but he couldn’t make out her name script from where she was standing, just her clanrune: Maniro. He hadn’t been keeping up with clan politics as of late, but unless a bomb went off and he hadn’t heard about it, he knew the Maniro and the Sendra were on terms like kin to each other.

“And you’re sure that’s him?”

“Never seen another Terran dressed like him, he weird or something?”

“Nah. Just a Dickhead chasing a style.”

Van holstered his gun, and the room exhaled slightly. By the time he had pulled the Clanwrit from his pocket, people were turning back to their drinks. It was old world stuff, printed on clan letterhead on paper made of gelim grass pulp, signed with sikali ink, the Sendra clanrune punched through the paper and embellished with two short ribbon chains, made to be carried in a shielded pouch, and displayed as identification as an appropriate Clan agent. Folded further inside it was the payend he’d printed off and registered at the FTL post, reinforced cellulose paper with dot matrix stippling: IOU- one serious sorta favor. This was how Granny Janila fronted him for expenses- having a favor with a Rhidling clan can get you a lot, especially with the honestly-crooked ones who had underworld connects and soldiers among their resources.

“Registered on the local nets across this sphere. You want to confirm it legit, take it down to the comms office and see yourself.”

“I know what a Sendra writ looks like,” said the Maniro, reading it over, “I’m in the Freelands because of a favor from them.” She sniffed it and smiled. “Smells like home,” she said, taking the payend and zipping it up her sleeve in a single motion.

The bartender piped up, “Am I calling the marshalls or are you two getting out of here?”

“No, actually, this is a nice spot, I think I wanna pitch a tent,” Van snapped. He felt how red his face was, and the knucklehead jerked back slightly. Fucking people, he thought through mental images of taking satisfaction from putting a few magnum slugs through the fancy bottles on his bar back. He swallowed, and sank some of his anger with it.

“Don’t suppose you and your people want to help me in figuring where he took the Sendra boy?” he said, turning to back to his savior.

“I can show you myself,” she said. She made for a handshake, then took a moment to rethink the grip she was reaching with. Van met her halfway with The Clamp- across species of intelligent life that have hands, The Clamp worked for basically everyone.

“Telin,” she said.

Van thought for a while what he was going to say, which from his standpoint felt utterly ridiculous. This moment was insignificant to the universe, and monumental to him. Once upon a time, he had a name, Van Parker. Then he had a callsign, one that he hated. Civilians have names and get to live. But he was in service again, and he had just realized it.

“Canine,” Van told her his callsign. He waited for the comment about his strange name. Then he realized she didn’t realize, relaxed slightly, and felt a vague sort of lousy for having done that.

Operations had codenames, and as much as he hated it, he was in an operator sort of mode. He felt focused. He felt strong. He felt like he wanted to die, all the same.